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Shame on the Tucson Unified School District for banning several books by Chicano and Native American authors. This is a psychological assault on the students and their families in a school district where more than 60 percent of the students are Latinos.

After the Arizona Legislature and an Arizona judge demanded the end of Tucson’s renowned Mexican American Studies program, the Tucson Unified School District, rather than appealing, decided to crack down. Its employees removed books from the shelves, made teachers box them up and, according to some reports, even ripped books out of children’s hands.

This kind of crude censorship should appall any person who respects books, academic freedom or the First Amendment.

Being a Mexican American writer myself, I’m disgusted by what happened in Tucson. The school district banned works by some of our greatest Latino scholars, including Rodolfo Acuna, Richard Delgado, Corky Gonzales, Elizabeth Martinez and Arturo Rosales. The dismantling of the Mexican American Studies program put off limits some of our best writers and poets, including Jimmy Santiago Baca, Ana Castillo, Martin Espada, Laura Esquivel, Dagoberto Gilb, Luis Rodriguez, Roberto Rodriguez and Luis Alberto Urrea. And it even knocked out history books by Howard Zinn, author of “A People’s History of the United States,” which has sold more than 2 million copies.

This is a tragedy for Mexican American kids in Tucson. The decade-long Mexican American Studies program improved the graduation rate of Latino and Native American students and gave them pride in their culture and history. But, apparently, educating Latino students and keeping them in school is not the goal of the Tucson Unified School District or the Arizona Legislature. Rather, controlling the books they read and the information they receive is the goal — and right now they are winning.

There is a big effort in this country to rewrite history. The Texas School Board previously rewrote the state’s school textbooks and took out things it felt were offensive. Tennessee may be next with an attempt to propagate the notion that slavery was not all bad and taking land away from the Native Americans was necessary for the continuation of the United States.

Victors usually write the history books, but there is much scholarly work, fiction and poetry now that offers history from other perspectives. Unfortunately, those who control what we learn as history just won’t tolerate any competing accounts. This violates the whole idea of academic freedom, and it runs contrary to the openness that we so celebrate in our country.

The censors in Arizona can ban books. They can try to censor information. But, eventually, the truth will come out. And the truth is that in our country, it took great struggles for a majority of people — women, minorities, those without property — to obtain the rights guaranteed to all persons in this country by our Constitution.

This is a lesson that every school kid should be entitled to learn.

Angela C. Trudell Vasquez works with the Wisconsin Civil Liberties Union and is a poet. She can be reached at pmproj@progressive.org.

By Wendell Berry

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion—put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

Wendell Berry is a poet, farmer, and environmentalist in Kentucky. This poem, first published in 1973, is reprinted by permission of the author and appears in his “New Collected Poems” (Counterpoint).